Dive Brief:
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Beyond dollars and cents, city budgets are moral documents that prioritize whose voices and needs are heard in a community, said Celina Su, a professor of political science at City University of New York, during a recent webinar hosted by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Next City.
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Su, who served on New York City’s participatory budgeting steering committee for a decade, described a growing movement of city residents working together to influence how public funds are allocated. Over a dozen other cities, including Chicago, Boston and Greensboro, North Carolina, have used participatory budgeting, according to HUD Exchange. The Participatory Budgeting Project reported 56 city, county and district level PB processes in 2018.
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Participatory budgeting is a way to engage young people, people of color and other historically marginalized communities, which can strengthen democracy and give local policymakers insight into what residents want to see funded, said Su, author of the 2025 book “Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities.”
Dive Insight:
Participatory budgeting began in Brazil, Su said, and more than 11,000 communities around the world have implemented it over the last three decades.
In the U.S., Su said, she began hearing the phrase “budget justice” during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. The message was that city budgets are “designed to be anti-democratic, to prevent public accountability,” she said. “People felt like their ideas were shut down in favor of projects considered technically feasible” by policymakers and lobbyists.
But budgets can act as a type of community justice, prioritizing projects residents want — things like “diaper distribution hubs, self-defense workshops for Muslim women or funding for food coops, artist coops, worker coops, school and childcare coops, CSAs, community gardens,” Su said.
New York City has the nation’s largest PB initiative, Su said. During the webinar and in a December 2025 article for Next City, she discussed how PBNYC operates and how other cities can implement their own PB processes.
In New York, City Council members can opt to earmark discretionary funds to participatory budgeting each year, Su said. Other, smaller cities get PB funds from community block grants, legal settlements or, in the case of Vallejo, California, from a dedicated sales tax, she said.
To kick off the yearly PBNYC process, residents hold neighborhood assemblies each fall to discuss community needs and projects. During the winter, volunteer groups decide which of those projects should be placed on a ballot, and in the spring, residents ages 11 and up can vote for the PB projects they like best. The winners are added to the city budget for funding and implementation.
“There’s something about having everyday folks participating and sharing in budget analysis,” Su said. For instance, during one PBNYC community meeting, neighborhood young people said a certain block “felt dodgy in the after-school hours. Well-meaning [city] planners didn’t know that,” she said. “Issues like that can’t be solved through pure number-crunching. Local, experiential knowledge is important alongside technical knowledge.”
